| Dear Internet visitor,
My intention is
to help you own a profitable Internet
Home Business.
Here is
Internet Home Business course that will help and guide
you to start off your Home Business on the Internet.
Lesson #4
10 COMMON ONLINE
MARKETING METHODS
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
In this lesson, we will enumerate the
10 most common Internet marketing methods used by
successful SFI Affiliates. While space prohibits us from
giving you more than a brief introduction to the first
five of these methods in this lesson, we will give a
brief introduction to the last five in our next lesson
and future lessons will address each of these methods in
more detail.
MARKETING METHODS
The most common Internet marketing
methods, particularly useful in promoting the SFI
affiliate program are these:
1) Doorway Pages and Search Engine
Registration
2) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Exchange Programs)
3) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Online Classifieds)
4) Banner or Textual Ad Placement (Affiliate and Paid
Placement)
5) Building Your Own Content-Rich Website
6) Utilizing an Opt-In Program
7) Hosting FFA Pages
8) Using Safelists, Announcement Lists, and Viral
marketing
9) Press Releases, Relationship Building, and Offline
Promotion
10) The Latest New Technique
Many of these methods overlap or have
much in common. Depending on what you read, there are
various ways to describe each of these methods and
various names with which to identify them. There is no
particular importance to the order in which we have
listed them here. The only reason to enumerate them into
the list above is for ease of learning. We will take the
first five in turn and give you a brief introduction in
this lesson. The next lesson will give you a brief
introduction to the last five. Subsequent lessons will
cover each of these methods in great detail (although
not necessarily in order). Let's get right to it.
DOORWAY PAGES AND
SEARCH ENGINE REGISTRATION
A "doorway page" is a Web page that is
used to lead people to the target interactive site. The
doorway page contains a link to your target page. The
target page is where you hope the user will take some
action, such as purchasing an affiliate product or
opting in to your program. The target page sells. The
doorway page gets their attention and leads them to the
target page. Doorway pages serve two main purposes: they
are used to optimize search engine placement and they
allow you to target your initial approach to different
demographics.
When you join SFI, you are given links
to different target pages that you can use to sell SFI
products or recruit affiliates. Because these pages
contain what is called a "CGI variable" to identify you
as the seller or recruiter, they can not be individually
registered in the Search Engines. That is, because there
is a "?" in the URL (Website address), search engines
will not accept them or will truncate off the most
important part—your ID number.
To work around this problem with the
search engines, affiliates use doorway pages. Savvy SFI
affiliates design and host a Web page on another server
with a different name so that the URL does not contain a
question mark. This doorway page then links to one of
the SFI target pages, and the link, of course, contains
the CGI variable identifying the affiliates ID number to
ensure proper credit. Really enterprising affiliates
create several different doorway pages, each appealing
to different types of people.
Even when there is no need to work
around a cgi variable in the URL, Internet marketers use
doorway pages to target different demographics.
Different things get different people's attention. Many
of the affiliates that come into SFI do so because they
are very serious about creating a successful home-based
business. They find SFI while searching for information
pertaining to home-based businesses or network
marketing. They understand network marketing terminology
and are seeking a comparison of this program with the
ones already familiar to them.
Other affiliates come to SFI because
they want an Internet business. They may have had little
experience with home-based businesses or network
marketing. These people understand Internet terminology
and are looking for a great affiliate program.
Obviously, you have to approach these different types of
people differently to attract them to the SFI program.
Thus, it is best to have one doorway
page for those seeking a home-based, multi-level
business and another doorway page for those seeking a
lucrative affiliate program. SFI well serves the needs
of both, but they need to be drawn to that realization
in different ways. You may also want to have different
doorway pages for younger prospects and older prospects;
one for the highly educated and one for those with
little formal education; one for those who are already
financially successful but want an Internet income and
one for those who are still struggling daily with bills
and creditors. There are many different demographic
groups that you can target with different doorway pages.
The best doorway pages are pages that
attract the targeted demographic by providing useful
information or entertainment, while remaining easy to
navigate. Stay tuned to future lessons to learn how even
the technically challenged can easily create useful
content for their Websites.
(Note: In SFI, doorway pages that you
design yourself must be approved by the SFI
administration if they do more than just contain an
approved link or textual ad. That is, if you provide
information or opinions about SFI above and beyond
insertion of an approved ad, you must seek prior
approval.)
When you have your doorway pages in
place, you need to register them with the search
engines. There are many factors involved in doing this
properly. You need to prepare your pages properly with
metatags, keywords, descriptions, keyword balancing,
content indications, as well as incoming and outgoing
link considerations. You then need to know the right
submission procedure and schedule your submissions
properly for each major search engine or directory.
There is much to say on these subjects and each will be
the topic of a future lesson in this course.
BANNER OR TEXTUAL AD
PLACEMENT (EXCHANGE PROGRAMS)
To gain traffic for your Website, you
need to prepare effective banners and textual ads. In
SFI, this is already done for you. Having banners and
textual ads prepared, you need to find places on the
Internet to place these banners and textual ads. One of
the earliest methods devised on the Internet was banner
exchanges. You agree with other Website owners to place
their ad on your page in exchange for placing your ad on
their page. This process has been facilitated by the
emergence of several banner exchange programs. You
register with the exchange program, upload your banner,
and your banner will automatically appear on other
registered Web pages throughout the world. In exchange,
they provide code for you to put on your Web page, which
hosts rotating banners from other sites. These are not
particularly effective, mainly because placement in
context on a page is rarely achieved. Context placement
is crucial to an ad or banner being effective in drawing
traffic.
Banner exchanges are very useful for
one purpose, however. Most of the exchange programs
allow you to target the types of pages on which your
banners will be placed. If you happen to have a
high-traffic Website which appeals to one demographic,
but your target in a particular affiliate program is
another demographic, you can "exchange" your traffic
through use of an exchange program. Say your site draws
high traffic from retired people who love to garden and
travel. With a banner exchange, you can have your banner
targeted to sites which appeal to home-based
entrepreneurs. In return, you host banners on your site
which target the group which frequents your site
(advertising, for example, gardening tools or motor
homes). Since effective context placement is much more
likely to be achieved in this situation, it usually
works fairly well for all parties involved.
BANNER OR TEXTUAL AD
PLACEMENT (ONLINE CLASSIFIEDS)
One of the easiest ways to get your
banners and ads on a high-traffic Website is to place
them on some online classified ad pages. Several major
sites allow you to place classified ads for free. There
are others, such as Yahoo!, that charge fees for
placement of classifieds. These can be effective
depending upon the volume of ads being submitted at any
given time. If it is a high traffic site, your ad will
only appear for a matter of hours before it is pushed
too far down by new submissions to be useful. Daily
attention and resubmission is crucial to an effective
classified ad campaign on the free sites.
There are links to the many online
classified sites that have been effective for SFI
affiliates on the SFI DBoard Resource Site (
http://www.dboardresources.com). Starting with
classified ads is a good way to get your feet wet in
Internet marketing.
BANNER OR TEXTUAL AD
PLACEMENT (AFFILIATE AND PAID PLACEMENT)
You can also pay to have your banner
or ad placed on other Websites. This is a broad category
that covers many different possible arrangements. You
can pay for placement for a period of time. You can pay
only for clicks actually received through your ad on a
site. You can pay only for sales or sign-ups that come
through a particular site. Affiliate programs encompass
the latter of these options. There are services where
you can register an affiliate program and people who go
to these services can sign up to host your ads. When
they sign up, they download your banner or ad to their
site. The service independently tracks and verifies the
clicks, sales, or sign-ups, that originate from
particular affiliate sites and facilitates the payments
that are due.
Also included in this category are
ezine ads. Ezines are e-mail newsletters that people
have opted-in to receive. They are full of interesting
content so that people actually read them when they show
up in their inboxes. You can pay the ezine publisher to
include your ad and a link to your site in an ezine
edition. Ideally, your ad will fit into the context of
the information in that particular ezine edition.
"Pay-pers"—services which pay people
to receive and read e-mail or host software which
displays ads on their screen—also fall under this
category. You can pay to have your e-mail ad sent to
people who have agreed to receive the e-mail for a small
fee per e-mail. This is not spam because the people who
receive the e-mail have opted to receive it in exchange
for a small payment per e-mail received and read. These
programs are very effective because the e-mails are
actually read and the links clicked.
BUILDING
YOUR OWN CONTENT RICH WEBSITE
As explained in our first lesson on
Spam, except for safelists and paid ads purchased from
opt-in programs, you cannot rely on e-mail for Internet
marketing. You must use Websites and opt-in programs
instead. We discussed the doorway site concept at the
beginning of this lesson. Whether a doorway page or an
independent target site, the most effective Internet
marketing method available is to have a site with rich
substantive content and entertaining attention grabbers.
There are hundreds of thousands of Websites on the
Internet now that consist of nothing more than banner
ads thrown on a page. They are all worthless! There is
no point in creating a Website if it does not have
content. Your Website must have both value and ease of
use to be effective in drawing and keeping traffic. (As
stated above, do not be dismayed if you feel incapable
at this time of creating such a site. Just relax and
keep reading your SFI materials.)
CONCLUSION
Remember that this lesson is just a
brief introduction to many different concepts. Do not be
concerned if you are still a little confused. Things
will become clearer as we address each method in more
detail. If you are itching to get started with your
Internet marketing campaign, you can start with posting
classified ads. Go to the Marketing Aids section of the
SFIMG Website. Pick out some of the text ads available
there for you to use. Then go to the SFI Discussion
Board's Resource Center and click the link to
"Classifieds." Pick out a couple of the free classified
sites and read the rules and instructions for posting.
Then, post one of the ads you copied from the SFI
marketing Resource Center. (You may want to create a new
e-mail address to use just to receive responses to this
ad. The Dboard Resource site also has a link to several
places where you can get a free e-mail account.) Go
ahead and get your feet wet with classifieds. You can
move onto the other methods as we discuss them in more
detail in future lessons.
WHAT'S COMING NEXT
In our next lesson, we will give you a
brief introduction to the last five of the Internet
marketing methods enumerated at the top of this lesson.
Subsequent lessons will discuss all of these methods and
more in great detail.
by George Little
Copyright (year) Panhandle On-Line, Inc.
License granted to Carson Services, Inc. for
distribution to SFI affiliates. No part of this work may
be republished, redistributed, or sold without written
permission of the author.
For more information on the Internet Income
Course and other works and courses by George Little, see
www.profitpropulsion.com.
For Web Hosting services specially designed for
SFI affiliates, see www.profitpropulsion.com.
Continue To Next Lesson
>>>
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